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January 13, 2013

I have owned computers since 1982 when I bought my first Apple II+. Over the years, computers got old and new ones took their place. Often the monitors and the printers would last longer, but even they eventually needed to be replaced.

As computer prices have fallen and new devices have been introduced, we feel tremendous marketing pressure to upgrade to the latest and greatest products. After a life working in technology, I am likely more addicted to new stuff than most people.

For twenty years a career at Apple gave me a source of the latest and greatest techno-tools. I won one of the first iPads off the production line in a sales contest. There was always an employee promo where I could buy a slightly old product at a bargain basement price.

The problem was that I ended up with a basement full of old computers. The way the world of technology works, even the best of them eventually have to be retired because manufacturers stop supporting them in the hopes that you will buy something new.

Starting in 2004 a series of Apple products that did not exhibit Apple's legendary longevity got me thinking about technology in a different way. If technology was only going to last eighteen to twenty months like my 15" Aluminum Powerbook G4, why buy the most expensive?

My next laptop from Apple was a white MacBook. While it also had to go back to the factory for repair, at least it broke while under warranty and was less expensive. A couple of hard drive transplants helped keep the MacBook going for five years. During that five years I also learned that I could accomplish just about everything I needed to do with an even less expensive Windows laptop.

When the MacBook started dying it got replaced by a 15" Lenovo I7 laptop that cost less than half the price of an equivalent Mac laptop. At the same time my MacBook was dying, my iMac, otherwise known as my iLemon, was also in its death throes.

I managed to keep the iLemon limping along for several months by running it off an external drive. While I was battling to keep the iMac going, I came close to leaving the Mac platform. I finally decided that there were a few reasons to continue using a Mac so I recently took delivery of the cheapest Mac that I could find.

My new Mac is Apple's bottom end MacMini. True to Apple's form, it might be the low end model, but it is still not inexpensive. The MacMini listed for $599 and did not even come with a keyboard, mouse or a DVD drive. The Lenovo tower that I bought the same week cost only $499 and came with a hard drive twice the size, twice the memory, a DVD drive, and they threw in a nice keyboard and mouse. The Lenovo tower is replacing my dual G5 Mac which just celebrated its eighth birthday last December. I still use it, but there is no longer a current browser available for it so its uses are minimal and mostly limited to Photoshop which I don't want to buy again.

The MacMini got attached to the eight year old flat panel screen that originally came with the dual G5. The Lenovo tower got hooked up to a three year old Dell LCD screen. It is hard to believe that I am managing to use these computers without a single Apple Retina display. The two new computers join a Dell Pentium III system that was purchased in September of 2004. It is running Ubuntu Linux and fortunately the Linux folks value older hardware so I have a good set of current browsers on it.

Together my two new computers cost a couple of hundred dollars less than the price of a single new iMac. My iLemon is the last all in one computer that we will purchase. Adding video connectors so dead iMacs can be used as monitors later won't change my mind. I am done with products like the iMac.

iMacs are hard to service and are typically hard to upgrade. The iLemon was our family's eighth iMac. I think only one is still running. The others all had to be replaced and all those still working and beautiful CRTs and flat panel screens went to recycling. It is something that I regret.

This whole disposable technology thing puts us all in some interesting situations. Just a year ago I ended up buying a new laser printer because it was cheaper to buy a new printer than to gamble that a new cartridge would solve the problems on my old printer.

I have no plans to abandon technology which plays a big part in my life. I'm just planning to be a lot smarter about it. I'm happy to say that both the new MacMini and the Lenovo are working well with our HP Inkjet which is over six years old. They also like my $99 laser printer.

The manufacturers of televisions are pushing hard to sell these new smart TVs. I'm hoping to add a few features to our six year old television for around $100. If Apple ever comes out with their new super smart television, you can bet it will be super expensive. I won't be waiting in line for it either. I don't watch enough TV to care what kind of screen technology that we have. To me a smart TV is one that is turned off when I want some peace and quiet.

My new goal is to get the most technology bang for my limited dollars. Most technology devices don't get used to their full potential anyway. There is generally a lot that can be done even with some of the less expensive products on the market.

I suspect there is very little that anyone can do on their iPad that I can't do on my $199 Nexus 7. On top of spending fewer dollars, if I can send less technology stuff to recycling, I will sleep better at night.

September 17, 2005

On page nine of the Saturday, September 17, Roanoke Times, in the upper right hand is a graphic not too dissimilar from the NOAA one that I have included in this post.

The title above the graphic is "Ophelia headed for open ocean."

The difference between the one in the Roanoke Times and the one from NOAA is the Times' version is cropped just above Yarmouth, Nova Scotia so that one might rightly conclude that Ophelia is just headed for open ocean.

Those of us who know the world extends beyond New England happen to know that there is land north of the US border, and that Opehlia is headed directly for Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, and Newfoundland.

If you go to the online version of the Chronicle Herald, which is published in Halifax, NS, the largest city in the Canadian maritimes, you will find a little different perspective on Ophelia than was conveyed by the graphic in the Times. The Chronicle headlines verify that Opehila is on track to hit Nova Scotia.

Preparing for the worst

Nova Scotians stocking up as Ophelia bears down on province

If you dig into the article, you'll find that Nova Scotians are preparing for Opehila very much like we in the Roanoke Valley prepare for a large snow or ice storm.

From the article in the Chronicle Herald, these are the predictions.

The storm will likely strike southwestern Nova Scotia this evening but "there is going to be rain throughout the day (over the mainland)," Environment Canada meteorologist Ted McIldoon .....

Then, as Ophelia bears down, winds may gust to 90 kilometres per hour and rainfall could total between 70 and 100 millimetres in some areas, Mr. McIldoon said.

Potential for flooding is expected to be heaviest in southwestern areas and the Annapolis Valley.

The storm is expected to make landfall east of Halifax around midnight and cross Cape Breton later Sunday morning, Mr. McIldoon said.

Seas will be between six and seven metres and forecasters were warning of a possible 60- to 70-centimetre storm surge in the Cape Sable Island area if Ophelia times its arrival with high tide.

To provide a little translation, wind speeds up to 56 miles per hour are expected. They are predicting from 2.75 inches of rain to almost 4 inches of rain with waves in the sea at 20 to 23 feet and a tidal surge of about 2.3 feet.

While these aren't extreme numbers (waves excluded), they are certainly something we would be concerned about here in our valley. The tidal surge on Sable Island isn't a huge one, but the potential flooding in the Annapolis Valley may be due in part to the tidal nature of the Annapolis River and the topography that isn't very dissimilar to what we face in our mountain valleys.

As you can see from this picture that I took in the early seventies, the Annapolis Valley isn't very wide. I was standing on one mountain taking a picture of the other mountain just a few miles away.

Thus a lot of rain in a short time can create flooding. Fortunately the Annapolis River doesn't have as a large and as mountainous a drainage area as does the Roanoke River. Also the Annapolis Valley is not going to be in the most dangerous quadrant of the tropical storm when it makes land fall.

Things could have been much worse. Had Ophelia taken a slightly more westerly track and come up the Bay of Fundy as some storms have done, it would have had a chance to enhance a tide which already is as much as 45 feet. We were living in Nova Scotia when a storm close to hurricane strength very nearly came up the middle of the Bay of Fundy. It was impressive. In case you are wondering the Bay of Fundy has the highest variation between high and low tides of anywhere in the world.

Canadians are used to the American perception that weather systems stop at the border or that the unknown territory on the Weather Channel television maps is beyond the realm of possibility for many in the US. Canadian also believe that America doesn't pay much attention to the potential impact of their policies on the people who live where weather systems fall into a black hole.

I can only hope the people in the Roanoke Valley that stop by my blog are by now well aware of the land beyond Maine, know as the Canadian Maritimes. (Google Map)

June 10, 2005

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and it is pretty clear that we have reached a critical state. I have some ideas on the subject that are actually going to be part of an article that I want to write.

However, I ran across an interesting item in "What's Your Brand Mantra?" one of the blogs that I try to visit on a regular basis. This quote pretty well puts the issue in focus. The scenario is Jennifer Rice, the author in residence, has asked Seth Godin, author of "All Marketers Are Liars," a question. This is his response as quoted in Jennifer's blog.

I don't know how to make it clear to US citizens that every successful politician is a big-time liar, and that we, as citizens, need to get over our desire to romanticize or demonize every story that comes along. We're killing people, destroying things and making more decisions than ever before that are nothing but irrational reactions to pre-sold stories. It's one thing to come up with a clever way to market Vosges chocolates. It's quite another, I think, to effectively tell stories that hurt people.

We have let two things happen to our political system. One is that marketers whose experience is in packaging items and convincing us to buy them even when we don't need them, now control much of the "image" that is in theory our candidates and the people who run our government.

The second thing is that we have let large corporations finance most of this. What we get back is a government designed to reward, not surprisingly, corporations and their ever richer CEOs.

I have a radical thought on how to effectively derail this mess but I'll save that for my article. Just think of some of the consequences of this kind of political process.

Remember those carefully scripted conventions last summer. The reality is that we had a competition to run the most powerful country in the world between two media groomed lackluster students. Check out my post, "Kerry & Bush Both Lackluster Students," for more details. Talk about a good job of packaging.

Of course the even worse consequence is that we had an unnecessary war "marketed" and sold to us. This is exactly the kind of stuff that can happen when the image makers take over government. We need to stop it.

I also found the comments on Jennifer's post very interesting. If we can't figure out how to fix government, we're headed for serious trouble. This is obviously something near and dear to my heart as I wrote in my post, "Keeping The Republic Alive."